In a few short years marijuana went from being a sordid brain poison used mainly by deadbeats and drop-outs, to being an allegedly harmless miracle medicine and supposedly mild intoxicant at the heart of a billion-dollar business.

It is tolerated in all kinds of places from New York City to Germany (since last April Fools’ Day). And an apparently unstoppable campaign hopes to make it legal everywhere, including here. Will this happen?

So strong (and so rich) is the force behind the campaign for legal cannabis that both President-elect Donald Trump and Vice-President Kamala Harris embraced the policy in the months before the US election.

Mr Trump was bullish. He wrongly predicted last August that personal amounts of marijuana would be legalised for adults in Florida, ‘whether people like it or not’. He seemed to like it, declaring ‘someone should not be a criminal in Florida when this is legal in so many other states’. (As of April 2024, recreational use is legal in 24 states).

A cannabis shop drums up trade in Los Angeles. California, where cannabis has long been legal, is now crammed with both legal and illicit marijuana shops

He added, regurgitating the arguments of legalisers everywhere: ‘We do not need to ruin lives and waste taxpayer dollars arresting adults with personal amounts of it on them.’

Ms Harris, for her part, pledged: ‘I will legalise recreational marijuana, break down unjust legal barriers and create opportunities for all Americans to succeed in this new industry.’

Their confidence was not surprising. Almost $150 million was spent by the pro-legalisation campaign, most of it supplied by existing marijuana businesses

And yet both of them seem to have misjudged the mood. As well as Florida, North and South Dakota had pro-marijuana proposals on the their ballot papers on November 5, which would have legalised it for recreational use. But in all three, the pro-drug cause was defeated.

By far the greatest blow to the marijuana cause was the Florida result. It is a populous state much visited by American and foreign tourists. But its voters refused to approve a constitutional amendment that would have made cannabis legal.

Many were influenced by the vigorous and intensive opposition of the state’s successful and effective governor Ron DeSantis. He warned that permitting the unrestricted use of marijuana would inundate cities with marijuana smoke and make roads more dangerous, saying: ‘It would be everywhere. The state would smell like it. We don’t need that in Florida.’

To pass, the proposal required 60 per cent of votes, but it only won 56 per cent support (5,927,237 for; 4,682,004 against). On the same night, voters in South and North Dakota defeated legal weed initiatives by more decisive margins. In South Dakota, the rejection of legal marijuana was strong – 55.5 per cent against (237,228) versus 44.5 per cent in favour (189,915).

Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris backed the campaign to legalise cannabis in Florida during the US election – but voters rejected a change to the state constitution last week

In North Dakota, the vote was closer but still definite – 52.5 per cent (190,107) against 47.5 per cent (171,708) in favour. These are not crushing defeats, though they show what can happen when the anti-legalisation movement fights hard. But it does look as if America’s almost total surrender to billionaire lobbies for dope legalisation is faltering.

Mainstream political support for so-called ‘legal regulation’ of marijuana is common in Britain, too. Labour’s David Lammy, now Foreign Secretary, praised Canadian legalisation of the drug in 2019.

In 2018, former Tory Leader and one-time foreign secretary William Hague urged the then prime minister, Theresa May, to legalise cannabis, saying the UK’s drug policy was ‘inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date’ and that the ‘battle is effectively over’.

Lord Hague jeered that telling the police to stop people smoking cannabis was ‘about as up to date and relevant as asking the Army to recover the Empire’. Ireland’s Fianna Fail, a mainstream party, is also toying with cannabis decriminalisation.

The arguments have been the same for a quarter of a century. Cruel laws, it is claimed, throw harmless dope smokers into prison for a victimless crime. Racial minorities are more severely treated, for this offence, than the majority.

Legalisation will allow the state to raise huge new tax revenues, and permit the regulation of the drug to stop nasty high-strength versions reaching the market. None of this is true.

The main victims are the families of users, trying to cope with the incurable illnesses of their children. In Britain, for decades it has been hard to find an instance of anyone sent to prison for a simple first-offence charge of marijuana possession.

Police in Britain generally ignore dope-smokers if they possibly can, and the usual response is an unrecorded ‘caution’ or ‘warning’.

In the US, in 2012, the ultra-liberal magazine Rolling Stone published a list of the top-ten marijuana myths, one of which was that the jails were full of people prosecuted for marijuana possession. As the magazine said: ‘About 40,000 inmates of state and federal prison have a current conviction involving marijuana, and about half of them are in for marijuana offenses alone’ but ‘most of these were involved in distribution. Less than one per cent are in for possession alone’. It will be many fewer by now.

As for the ‘regulation through legalisation’ myth, its flaws were evident. The feeble police response to marijuana possession has helped the growth of huge illegal markets all over the West. Legalisation barely dents it. Illegal drugs are cheaper, precisely because they are not regulated or taxed.

Colorado, one of the first US states to go legal, initially did well because people flocked from other states to buy licit drugs. But the spread of the legalisation movement, and the undercutting of legal sellers by untaxed illegal sellers, have led to a severe downturn there.

The main effect of legalisation is to make the drug easier to buy, without in any way curbing the gang-dominated lawless market. Six years after legalisation in Canada, as much as half the Canadian market may still be in the hands of illegal dealers. How would anyone find out for sure?

California, where cannabis has long been legal, is crammed with illicit marijuana shops. Drug-driving is a growing problem (as it is here in the UK). The drug is also linked with anti-social behaviour and the decay of formerly orderly neighbourhoods.

But the other huge problem is the mental health issue. Many still argue that cannabis is a wonder drug, though hard evidence of its curative powers remains elusive, and the side-effects – as I shall show – might make it unattractive anyway.

One of the US’s longest-serving campaigners for dope legalisation, Keith Stroup, admitted in a student newspaper interview in February 1979 that he and his allies would be using medical pot as ‘a red herring to give marijuana a good name’. Which they certainly did. But that is not all.

Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis campaigned against cannabis being legalised in his state, saying: ‘It would be everywhere. The state would smell like it. We don’t need that in Florida’

What if marijuana is actually bad for you and for society? What if legalisation just makes life more dismal and sordid?

In July 2023, the liberal Washington Post finally exploded the legalisers’ myth that Portugal’s feeble drug laws have created a sort of paradise of tolerance. In an article illustrated with dispiriting pictures of drug-related squalor on the streets, it described how ‘authorities are sealing off warren-like alleyways with iron bars and fencing in parks to halt the spread of encampments’. Those living nearby were scared, and even the police – in many countries now a noisy part of the pro-drug lobby – blamed a rise in crime on the growing number of people using drugs. 

But that is not all. Now that many US cities, especially New York itself, stink of cannabis, and its victims wander the streets in often obvious distress, many are wondering if allowing its unlimited use was wise.

Following the publication of two powerful books linking marijuana use with mental illness – Patrick Cockburn’s Henry’s Demons, in Britain and Alex Berenson’s Tell Your Children, in the US, the smug certainties of the drug’s boosters have faded.

Even the New York Times, the megaphone of liberal opinion, recently published a major, deeply researched article, warning: ‘From Washington State to West Virginia, psychiatrists treat rising numbers of people whose use of the drug has brought on delusions, paranoia and other symptoms of psychosis.’

Is it possible that the long and damaging domination of the pro-dope lobby is at last coming to an end? Let us hope so.